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New images from Johannes Schedler

Submitted by Kevin Jardine on 31 May, 2008 - 08:56

I see that Johannes Schedler, one of the world's greatest astrophotographers, has just posted a number of new images taken during his annual trip to Namibia. (Click on the new images section on his site to see them - as his site uses frames, it is difficult to link directly to them). As usual, the images are stunning and I expect that several will eventually end up on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

I was especially interested in his clear image of the Homunculus - the remnants of the 19th century explosive brightening of Eta Carinae. I had thought that an image this clear could only be captured by Hubble. Schedler's work shows what images a patient and talented amateur astronomer (with the right equipment in the right place) can capture.

I'm a little disappointed that there are so few good images of many lesser known southern hemisphere nebulae on the Internet. Most astrophotographers (including Schedler) tend to photograph well known objects. I think that this is probably for two reasons: one is that astrophotographers are competitive and want to capture images comparable to other astrophotographers and the second is that astrophotographers are motivated primarily by aesthetics rather than science and the lesser known nebulae tend to be fainter and perhaps less dramatic. For those reasons, there are dozens of images of the Eta Carinae nebula or the Eagle nebula for every single image of the less known ones in the RCW catalog.

Nevertheless, I'd like to draw attention to the list of RCW objects I gave to the South Africa based astrophotographer Dieter Willasch last year. I challenge astrophotographers to try to image some of those. The results would be new and might contain surprises - even for scientists familiar with them.